Oslo and Out

This short posting is really just a vehicle for the seal pictures that I haven’t put up yet.  Nothing too much interesting happened since the last entry.  I went to the bar, didn’t see any polar bears, flew down to Oslo for the weekend, did the tourist sight rotation down there (National Museum, opera house, Viking ship museum, Vigeland Sculpture Park, etc…), had some drinks with some friends, then hopped on the plane back to the US.  The weather in Oslo wasn’t very good, so the light wasn’t right for taking many photos down there.  (Also, while Oslo seems to be an immensely livable city, it isn’t that photogenic…) 

Hvor er alle isbjornene?

So let me get this out of the way at the outset - we were unsuccessful in our quest to see a polar bear.  Which is a little bit ironic because this week there have been four different polar bears sighted in the tiny town of 3000 in which we are staying.  It has made national news.  Residents have Facebook status updates saying things like “Arming myself to run to the store.”  It’s like the polar bears are mocking me.

 

One of the major hindrances to polar bear viewing turned out to be the weather.  The snowstorm that started at the end of the last blog post continued throughout the next day.  Which certainly made the next day’s dogsledding activity slightly less pleasant, but did give it a certain air of authenticity.  Johnny Norseman and I took turns driving our six dog team through the blinding snow.  I couldn’t see anything at all without my sunglasses.  The sled would get stuck in the fresh powder, necessitating the driver hopping off and pushing to get the dogs started again, jumping back on quickly before the dogs ran off with the passenger.  And as well trained as the dogs were, they were still dogs.  At one point, our team hooked a sharp right and took off after a reindeer.  I have to say that it has greatly increased my sympathy for polar explorers.  It would truly suck to have to do that for weeks at a time just to see your compass spin. 

 


The next day was our big snowmobiling trip to the east coast - polar bear country.  It was a long day, nearly 150 miles roundtrip, driving a snowmobile across tundra, glaciers and sea ice at speeds up to 55 miles per hour.  It was a cold day too - the air temperature was only in the teens when we started, plus the wind chill plus the wind speed.  This would have made things uncomfortable, but blasting across the top of a glacier, clouds blending in with the blowing snow to make it seem like the top of the world, frozen sea looming up before you, is really so god damned badass that you don’t care much about the temperature.  (Though I guess it is all fun and games until someone loses as toe.)  The rules for glacier driving and similar to that of the sea ice that we would cross later that day - follow the tracks in front of you.  The lead snowmobile has a GPS that has a map made by helicopters.  If you fall into a crevasse the whole group is going to have to wait in the cold while you and your compound fracture are towed out.  Follow the tracks in front of you. 

Have I mentioned how badass it feels?  It’s like a really cool Super Mario Cart board come to life.

Anyway, when we got to the East Coast, where the polar bears are usually found, it was snowing like crazy with wind coming from the ocean.  Taking off your gloves, even for the 30 seconds it takes to switch a camera lens, put you in imminent danger of frostbite. I hunkered down next to the heat of my snowmobile engine for a few minutes while I scanned the horizon with my 300 mm lens (basically the equivalent of a pair of binoculars) before I really didn’t care that much about the polar bears anymore.  I wanted to keep my fingertips.  (It didn’t help that there was a guy on my plane on the way up that was missed significant chunks of his extremities.)  Fortunately, “forget the bears” was a pretty popular sentiment among the group, and we headed back across the glacier.  The rest of the day was spent cruising by seals and reindeer while skimming across the sea ice with ice blue glacier walls rising at the edge of the shore.  In case I haven’t mentioned this - totally badass. 

Today is our last day here in Svalbard, and the weather is impeccable.  Ice blue sky and no wind.  Of course we chose today to explore the completely enclosed ice cave.  The ice cave is formed by glacier melt water and runs for miles about six stories below the surface, with the melting and refreezing forming incredible ice stalagmites and stalactites.  The tunnel ranges from walking comfortably with cathedral ceilings to wiggling on your stomach below giant chunks of ice.  The caves obviously aren’t lit, so everyone has a miner style head lamp to guide the way.  (Those who know me well can certainly picture the scene where I have my tripod set up on the timer and am trying to coordinate the position of my fellow hikers to most dramatically light a particularly nice ice formation.)  At the end, we all had coffee and cookies in a particularly large chamber, then emerged back out into the blinding light of the glacier surface. 

So tonight it is down to Oslo for a couple days - then back to Washington.  Unless I meet a polar bear on the way home from the bar tonight, I will have to try again another day...

Snowmobiling 101

So today I learned how to drive a snowmobile.  Johnny Norseman and I took a trip with three other tourists and a guide (armed guide - every one leaving the city limits must carry a rifle or sizable handgun in case of polar bear attack) to dash around the glacier and visit Barentsburg, a random little Russian coal mining town about 60 kms from Longyearbyen.  (It is sort of a long story how there is a random little Russian coal mining town in the middle of the Norwegian Arctic.  It involves intricate international treaties, but the necessary bits for this story is that it was built between 1950 and 1980, is staffed by 400 Ukrainian miner and there assorted dependents, and very much feels like not only stepping into Russia, but stepping back in time into Russia.  But I digress.)



The basic concept of snowmobiling isn’t that difficult.  On the left, there is a brake, very similar to the one found on every 10 speed bike in the world.  On the right is a level that serves as that throttle, the harder you pull back, the faster you go.  The only vaguely complicated bit is that the terrain you cross is very uneven, so when you turn on any kind of gradient, you need to shift your weight by climbing off the seat and leaving hard to the high side to keep the machine steady.  (It is sort of like a combination of leaning into a turn on a motorcycle and sitting on the high side on a little sailboat.)  They are relatively heavy - with the one I rode weighing as much as my little Rav4 back home - but they do go over if you aren’t careful - as we will see firsthand later on in our story. 



Anyway, these things a frigging blast.  Blazing along the top of the glacier, under the crystal blue sky, ice flows in the ocean looming ahead, reindeer scattered on the hillsides… (A note about the reindeer here, they are pygmies!  They have these stumpy little legs to keep them low to the ground so they stay warmer during the bitter cold months.  If I wasn’t positive I would be run through with an antler as soon as I got too close, I would certainly bring on home - and be the envy of all the designer dog snobs at the park. But I digress.) 



The trip out of Barentsburg takes a few hours with picture stops along the way.  You can tell you are getting close when you see the giant plumb of black smoke rising into the sky.  We had lunch at the Soviet style cafeteria - where everything was served with beets and mayonnaise.  We say the aging mine entrance, the aging school, the aging social hall, the aging hospital, the aging church, the aging sports club…  It must have been a veritable worker’s paradise a generation or so ago.  Now the only people crazy enough to work there (there was a giant coal dust fire a few years back that was only extinguished when the entire mine was filled with sea water for a little while) are chain smoking Ukrainians on two year contracts.  Cheers to those boys - after two hours I was ready to get the hell out of there.






Which only left the trip back.  But Mother Nature had added a new wrinkle.  It has started to snow.  Less than 30 minutes into the ride, conditions were near complete white out.  I was the first snowmobile behind the guide and I was struggling to keep the black speck in sight.  Also, when you can’t see the terrain, you are less able to anticipate when you are going to need to compensate, leading to a few exciting moments when you hit an embankment or large bump in the snow.  After an hour or so, we stop for cookies and to admire what I would assume is a fine view if the visibility ever crawled above zero.  (And it was cold.  It, in general, is cold here, with the high for today being only in the low 20s, but there isn’t any wind so with enough layers it isn’t too bad, unless you are on top of a glacier in the middle of a swirling snowstorm.  Then it is a little chilly.)  I have trouble getting my machine started, but eventually it turns over and off we go.  Conditions now are really tough.  I am struggling to stay upright and keep pace, but we don’t want to slow down too much because things aren’t likely to get better weather-wise.  Halfway into this final push, the guide stops.  I pull in behind him and turn around to look for the others.  But there are no others.  The guide drops the supply sled and turns around to find them. 



It couldn’t have taken more than 10 minutes.  (Johnny had hit a bad bump in the snow and went over.  The others had stopped to help get the snowmobile back up, but they had lost the two of us in the process.)  But the guide took the gun.  And I was all by myself.  In the middle of a snowstorm.  With almost no visibility.  With a supply sled full of things a polar bear might like to eat.  And me, which the polar bear might also like to eat.  It has been 15 years since the last fatal attack - mostly because of new safety precautions - but I was a little nervous.  If I saw a polar bear, I could probably outrun him on the snowmobile, but without a GPS and in the snow, I would be causing a second set of problems.  And I had had trouble getting the engine to turn over last time I started up.  Just as I was convinced that I could hear the snorting and shuffling of a hungry polar bear behind my back no matter which way I turned, the guide and my fellow riders come roaring up.  Back to town.  Where, having faced the first situation in my life where I had a practical use for a firearm, I was now faced with a somewhat more immediate need for a drink. 

And for those in the audience keeping score: in the last two days I have eaten seal, (minky) whale and reindeer.

Svalbard

As I guess most of you have heard, Washington DC had the snowiest winter on record this year.  Feet and feet of snow fell, closing schools and office buildings for more than a week.  You could ski right down the main 16th St. route to the White House.  But fortunately that has all ended.  Birds are singing, flowers are blooming, and the first traces of the characteristic heat, humidity and spike in the crime rate so typical of the DC summer are beginning to creep into the air.  So, what did I decide to do to celebrate the dawning of the spring season?  Take a vacation.  To the Arctic Circle.

There is still plenty of snow up here in Longyearbyen, Norway, the largest city on the Svalbard Islands.  This is supposedly the northernmost inhabited place in the world.  It is certainly northern.  I am 3.5 hours north of Oslo.  I am 2 hours north of the Arctic Circle.  I am north of most of Greenland.  You name it, I am north of it.  In fact, if you had the money or inclination, the north pole is only a 16 days dogsled away.  You would leave from Longyearbyen. 



And what in hell am I doing up here?  I must admit, that is a fairly good question that I don’t necessarily have the answer to yet myself.  This trip is the brainchild of one of my grad school friends, Johnny Norseman (who previously achieved fame on this blog by being the photographer for the famous picture of me tongue kissing a giraffe).  We are going to go hiking and snowmobiling and dog-sledding, and maybe, just maybe, see one of those elusive big white bears before global warming kills them all.  (Like taking a no hitter into the 8th, I don’t want to jinx it by saying the word.  They are hard enough to see with all your mojo working in the right direction - though there apparently was one across the bay from the airport when we landed.  All I saw was a tiny black speck at the edge of the water - and the opposite bank lined with camera toting tourists.  I hope to do better later in the week.)



But all that will have to wait a day or so.  I am confined to Mary Anne’s Polarrigg (the decidedly quirky lodge where we are staying) until Scandinavian Airlines finds my luggage.  Lost luggage in Africa is a pain in the ass.  Lost luggage in Svalbard is a frostbitten toe.  And in one of the more impressive customer relation moves I have seen recently, the woman at the SAS counter thought it was highly irresponsible of me to have packed my boots in my checked luggage.  Didn’t I know that they lost bags all the time?   How stupid could I be?



So I spent the morning sleeping in, reading my book, and gorging myself on Norwegian Sunday breakfast.  And examining the décor.  I guess it would be best classified as a nouveau taxidermy/mine motif.  The walls are painted with coal mining scenes (which, along with tourism and observational astrophysics, makes up the bulk of the economy up here).  In lieu of table runners, there are seal skins.  The floor has reindeer rugs.  And there are stuff polar bears everywhere (including one wearing boxing gloves that you must remember to duck when walking down the hall).  The hotel key chains are made of reindeer antlers.  Despite all the incredible natural splendor outside, I am starting to suspect that this might not be the place to the more strident environmentalist in the world.



Anyway, I will sign it off here.  There is a nice cozy seal skin armchair waiting for me and my book.  Besides, I will have regular internet access up here (bonus quirk of vacationing in the developed world for a change), so you will probably hear from me fairly often this week.  The photo selections are taken from my seat in the plane during the approach.  It was exactly like coming into Nouakchott over the Sahara, but pure white.

 

Ce n'est pas une post.

So this little quickie isn't really blog-post worthy, but it amused me.  I am just back from two weeks in Dar es Salaam - where all I did was work - so I don't have any good stories.  But on the way out of the country, the power was out at the airport.  As printing the boarding passes as they usually do was not possible, Ethiopian Airlines had to hand write them.  And knowing the unreliability of the power supply in Dar, you would think they would be prepared.  Instead however, someone dug way back into the way-back file to find these 70s vintage specials.  Note the retro font and color scheme.  And the box to tick as to whether I wanted a smoking or non-smoking seat. 

Scenes from Malawi

So alas, my three week field adventure in Malawi was cut short by a small crisis in Tanzania.  I am back in Dar es Salaam - working constantly - and with no more monkeys on my roof.  Consequently, I don't have much in the way of wild adventure.  But I will post a couple of pictures from the one day in the field in Malawi that we did have.  I am also adding a couple of pictures about what my life is like (conducting household and agricultural surveys in developing countries).  Note the overabundance of corn in these pictures.  That is true both of like in Malawi and my life lately. 

Here we go with life in Malawi... And in honor of the Yankees upcoming 2010 World Championship Series, I choose a baseball narrative for this post:

Leading off and playing left field we have Corn!

In the second spot, playing short stop, we have Road Side Mushroom Stand...

Playing center and batting third we have the speedy but pesky, Kids at the Pump!

Batting clean up is the strong man of the order, the DH, Guy with Bamboo on Bike!

In the five spot and playing a gold glove first base, we have More Frigging Corn!

Batting sixth and guarding against the double down the line at third, we have Lady with Boy and Pumpkins...

Down the bottom three in our order, we have the man behind the plate, Shucking "Guess What" Corn!

Batting eighth and guarding the short porch in right, we have Bored Old Lady Getting Interviewed!

And finally, in the nine spot and playing second, we have My Class of Field Enumerators in Training!

Well that concludes our trip around the horn!  For those of you who are interested in a little substance with your photos, I am adding a vignette to the previous post about me along braining a Norwegian with a scalding hot iron. 

Hickory Smoked Knickers and Other Tales from the Road

I only have one picture for this entry.  I was working in Dar and then Nairobi, mostly the inside of office buildings, and now I am down in Zomba, Malawi.  Which is beautiful and green – mostly due to the weather’s continuous state of downpour.  The picture is of my room (#10) with a bunch of god damned monkeys on the roof.  And I assure you, nothing is louder at 5:15 am than a troop of monkeys on a corrugated metal roof.

The best I can do is send a quick series of vignettes from the last two weeks on the road.

Hickory Smoked Knickers: As I mentioned, it rains all the time here in southern Malawi.  It rains while I sleep, rains while I eat, rains while I work, rains while I run (the final one being the most unpleasant of the lot).  Other than the fact that my hair never dries and is sprouting mushrooms, I have almost gotten used to it.  One of its more unexpected externalities however is that it makes line drying clothing impossible.  As a result, my clothes are dried in a closed room with a wood fire.  (I am guessing the same on used for smoking crops at the end of the season…)  Everything therefore has the slight tinge of wood smoke, like one had been using hickory scented fabric softener.

Most Dangerous Thing He Did That Day: So the hotel I was staying at for the conference in Nairobi is a new hotel - Ole Sereni.  Built on the site of the former US embassy, it borders directly on the Nairobi National Park and is convenient to the airport.  On the down side, the staff is god awful.  I arrived fairly late for Tanzania and had to work early in the morning, so I decided to do my ironing at night.  I was watching CNN, ironing linen, when someone lets himself into my room.  Nairobi isn't the safest place on a good day, and this was nearly 11 pm.  I pull the iron from the wall and advance on the still opening door - which eventually reveals an SAS pilot backing up as quickly as his roller bag allows.  The desk had double assigned my room and given him a key.  He left quickly to sort it out.


Eating Meat Like It Is My Job: So my vegetarianism has been curtailed for this trip as it has been basically meat or nothing.  But if I am going to fall off the wagon, I am going to do it in style.  In Nairobi I went to a work dinner at the famous Carnivore restaurant.  Back in the day, it used to serve all sorts of weird game meats (gazelle, Cape buffalo, zebra – you can imagine what a country that serves springbok as an airplane meal could come up with when trying).  But, alas for the flesh eater and fortunately for the endangered species, this practice has been outlawed in Kenya.  I had to settle for crocodile (nice but a little boney), ostrich meatballs (heavenly – those big dumb birds were made for the ground meat culinary genre), and the internal organs of several less exotic species (livers, gizzards, etc.)  All of this left me feeling more than a little nauseous, but that was nothing a few Tuskers couldn’t fix.

Unibomber in 14A: So in addition to my work schedule, I have been taking a class one day a week at UMD on topics in advanced sampling.  (Tell me that is a sexy way to pass one’s limited spare time.)  As a result, I end up doing my homework problem sets whenever I get a chance.  In this case, it was on the 7:30 pm flight from Dar to Nairobi.  It had been a really long day and I was in a foul mood, so I just hunkered down in the corner with a handful of airplane mini-beers – scrawling sigmas and deltas on my yellow legal pad and trying to make this &%*$ing proof come out right.  About 45 minutes in – as I ordered my third shot glass of Heinkein, I noticed the person sitting at the end of the aisle was staring at me like my panties were stuffed with C4.  The poor kid couldn’t have been more than 16 and my drinking and growling at the page with a mechanical pencil stuck in my hair was stranger than anything he had seen on safari that week.  I tried to smile at him but I must have looked a little manic because he just leaned away.  Oh well.  Making friends wherever I go.

Newspaper Headline:  The media in Africa is quite vibrant and I like reading the local papers.  My favorite headline of the week: "80 passengers hurt when 36 seater bus veers off road..."  

18 Hours in Addis Ababa

So this isn’t really a blog entry.  It is just a little teaser of an entry because I have been in the United States for almost two straight months.  And I don’t blog about the US.  You all (well most of you anyway) live there and don’t need me to point out life’s little absurdities.  Not that I wasn’t tempted during those long 10 days where I was snowed in my apartment in Washington, drinking High Life and watching the Shining, watching my food stocks diminish to the point where I was debating between eating my roommate’s greasy frozen dinners or just eating my roommate…

But regardless I’ve been sprung.  I am writing this post 30,000 feet above the bleakness of northern Kenya, on my way to Dar es Salaam.  I was so excited to get back on the road again that I decided not to squander even my 15 hour layover in Addis.  Usually with these things I just go to the hotel, order room service, fire up the BBC and wait to go back to the airport, but not this time!  I was going to sample Ethiopia!  Unfortunately in my zest for life I forgot one of my cardinal rules.  Just as in college it was “never follow a hippie to a second location,” in my professional life it is “never ask the concierge to recommend a local restaurant.”  I ended up at a pseudo-traditional tented eatery, complete with live (and loud) Ethiopian band, and 50 very drunk American tourists.  Fortunately the food itself was epic, and the St. George’s was moderately cold, so all in all I was happy with my foray.

But it didn’t end there!  I woke up this morning at 4 am.  By 7 am, I was dressed, showered, packed, had answered my e-mail, sent off a powerpoint, downloaded two others, and was itching to do something…  So I asked the hotel taxi driver to take me on a quick tour of town before he dropped me back at the airport.  There really isn’t much going on a 7 am anywhere in the world, but he gave it his all.  We went by a number of interesting closed churches and museums, drove through empty historic squares and past quiet monuments, and through what would be the bustling downtown market had anything been open.  The only thing that I did get out and see was the Holy Trinity Cathedral – burial place of Haille Selaisse – former emperor of Ethiopia.

The cathedral was open for morning prayers - which meant I basically had to slip the bishop a couple of bucks to walk around.  But, despite the urging of the guide that I should please use my camera – the morning worshipers *like* getting their picture taken mid prayer, I couldn’t shake a weird voyeuristic feeling, so I took lots of pictures of stained glass and wood carvings, and only slipped in a couple of shots when I thought I was being unobtrusive.   Then we did a quick uncomfortable swing past the altar and tombs before I insisted that we walk around outside and look at the statues. 

In any case, I am landing and heading off to what I am sure will be five fun filled days of work in Tanzania, then on to teach a three day course in Kenya.  I will try to do something interesting, but it might be until I get to Malawi that I have another post for you.

The Great Goan Transit Debacle

So I just got back from a 4 day conference in town of Goa in southern India.  The conference had all the things you would expect from a conference: buffet meals, beach front hotel, power point presentations…  Not really the stuff of great blog postings.  Even the photos shown here are just a couple shots of the hotel grounds taken before dinner one night. 

I could talk a little bit about the country itself, as this is my third journey there, but I am reminded of that “if you have nothing nice to say…” thing.  It is not that I had problems with individual people – on the whole I find Indians to be assholes at the same rate as the rest of the population (roughly 10 percent – double if you are in an airport).  It is as if the very essence of the country conspires to make my time there as difficult as possible in some kind of karmic retribution for an unspeakable sin.  Seriously, I have been in 74 countries now (just tacked another one on yesterday but we will come to that).  In Mauritania, I wore a burqa and children still threw rocks at me.  In Congo, I lay in a delirious sweat pool with malaria while listening to soldiers firing their AK47s.  I got robbed in East Timor and had a gun held to my head in Nicaragua.  India still ranks dead last as 74 out of 74.  I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that I reflected on this as I watched a mechanic try to liberate my luggage from the overhead compartment using a screwdriver after my 10 hours in the Mumbai airport with missed connections and delayed flights.  All in my first 11 hours in the country. 

Now, in between my complaining about flights, I will admit that getting up at dawn to jog barefoot on the Goan white sand beach before jumping into the Indian Ocean does have a certain amount of charm.  That, however, is all I am willing to concede. 

But I survived.  On Tuesday afternoon I boarded my flight to Kuwait to make the connection to Washington and back to the US for Christmas.  Alas, United Airlines had other plans.  Or no plans.  In response to the blizzard, it posted a photocopied sign at its Kuwait City counter saying the flight had been canceled come back tomorrow.  And sent its entire staff home.  (I know this because I found my way into the personnel section to bang on their locked office door.)  So my colleague and I (who has a similar level of tolerance for bullshit – actually once almost getting arrested for her response to a security guard in the Qatar airport’s suggestion the she was fixing her hair too erotically in the transit lounge) found ourselves in an increasing mass of Blackwater type guys heading home for Christmas (there were about 4 women on this flight), facing down a clearly nervous airport security guard.   At one point a slightly cross eyed redneck loudly suggested the problem was that United didn’t have any staff on the ground in Kuwait – relying completely on local hired help.  To which I responded, perhaps a little louder than I meant to – that I *hated* contractors.  (At least we got a good laugh out of it.)  Soon after my colleague and I gave up and went to the Crowne Plaza – deciding to let the World Bank corporate travel department fight it out with United Airlines as to who would be responsible for the bill.

And so I am home again.  On Thursday evening, but I eventually made it.  And want to wish everyone a happy holiday and the best for the new year.*

*The above does not apply to the management or shareholders in United Airlines, which despite my ever dwindling standards for customer service, seems unfailingly to surprise me with new levels of incompetence.

Unicorn on the River

So despite the fact that the great Dhaka metropolitan area has the rough equivalent population of Scandinavia, the vast majority of the Bangladeshi population live in small villages across the vast delta of the Ganges.  (This is the largest delta in the world- trust me, I have gotten it wrong in Trivia Pursuit before.)

It seemed only fair that I should get a rural river experience to compliment the city tour.  Fortunately the friend of a friend who, along with his family, was kind enough to adopt me during my stay in Dhaka, was game to take the unicorn out and show her the river.  We drove about two hours outside the city, or about one hour outside the endless urban sprawl.   (Though once you do finally get past the sprawl, it becomes 100 percent rice paddy rather quick.)  We drove to a town (whose name I forget but won’t be able to pronounce in a million years anyway) and rented a speed boat to take us across the river to a more rural area.  (The starting point already seemed pretty rural to me but what do unicorns know?)

On the way across we stopped on an uninhabited island roughly the size of the neighborhood I grew up in.  It seemed a little odd that in a country where people literally live in baskets in the market that there would be such a big island with nothing on it but a handful of cows and some scrub vegetation.  The answer was that up until the most recent monsoon, the island didn’t exist.  The seasonal rains have a way of reclaiming and redistributing land as the Fates see fit.  (There is actually apparently a law on the books that if your land is washed away by the river, you will be able to reclaim it in roughly 15 years when it finishes materializing on the opposite bank.) 

The river trip itself was interesting as well – even beyond the fact that I just like going fast in motorboats.  All sorts of shit was going on on the river.  (That statement can be taken literally as well I am afraid.)  People fishing, people bathing, people fetching water, little rusting boats going one way, big rusting boats going the other way…  I tried to take some pictures but focus is a little difficult when you are slamming across the various wakes of the aforementioned watercraft.  I am posting the best of the blur.

On the other side of the river, we took a pleasant little rickshaw ride through the corrugated tin houses, the irrigated rice paddies, the NGO schools, the narrow canals…  All in all a quite enjoyable day.  The villagers were a-buzz about the white Muslim lady touring around town with her Bangladeshi husband (a little head scarf goes a long way apparently). Which came in quite handy when my “husband” fainted rather dramatically from dehydration at what turned out to be the conclusion of our outing.  Everyone was very concerned about my potential impending widowhood as they directed me to a place where I could get juice to raise blood sugar and a rickshaw to take us back to the boat.  One green coconut and a mango juice box later, we were back in business.  Crisis averted, phony marriage and day trip saved. 

Then it was back on the boat and back in the car and back to the city and back to work.  Things have been a little nutty at work this week as I am heading (finally) back to DC soon, but I did find time to learn how to fit three full sized adults in a rickshaw, where to buy cheap local pearls, and the ABCs of South Asia vegetarian street food.  All valuable skills I assure you.

Unicorn in Dhaka

It is very rare that I look down at my plane ticket before getting on a flight and think “man, this is going to suck.” But as I stood on the escalator in Dubai, looking down at the teeming mass below me jockeying for a place on line to get on 2 am flight to Bangladesh, that is exactly what I was thinking. I had just wrapped up a week in Tanzania to cap the two in Uganda and was ready to just go home and watch the Yankees. Bangladesh is an impoverished country of just over 55,000 square miles and a population of 150 million people, the highest population density in the world. (To put that in perspective, it is akin to the entire population of the US east of the Mississippi River moving to Illinois.) Almost completely surrounded by India, the nearest major metropolis is Calcutta. India has never been one of my favorites, and the idea that this was condensed crowded poorer version of India was unappealing. And alcohol is illegal.

But I got on the plane anyway and five hours later I was standing bleary eyed in my hotel room, watching through the window as the English Under 19 National Cricket team ran amok in the crystal blue swimming pool. While immediately behind the 10 foot wall, naked children played in a stagnant pool of green sludge. Fabulous.

So me and my little black rain cloud took a shower and went out in search of some culturally appropriate clothing and more reasons to hate on Bangladesh. As I ventured out of the hotel gates, the first thing that I noticed was how traditional this place was. Most men wear lungi skirts and the women saris or baggy trouser-tunics combos with scarves. Full beards and skull caps appear frequently. Even downtown there were thousands of cycle-rickshaws and men carrying huge baskets of produce on their heads. And of course the requisite odd loose piece of livestock in a traffic circle.

The second thing I noticed is that I blend like a unicorn. Bangladesh’s visitor promotion slogan since independence has been “come before the tourists get here.” Safe to say that they don’t need a new one yet. I was the only whitey anywhere. And it is perfectly socially acceptable to cease all activity as gawk like I was a large white horse with a golden horn protruding from my forehead. Just keeps getting better. I got in an auto-rickshaw and promptly got taken to the wrong location and overcharged. Then found another, took it to the right location and was overcharged. Eventually I found the clothing store where I discovered that size XXL was still too tight across my shoulders. Then it took forever to find another rickshaw to take me back to the hotel.

I was not good company when I finally found one. And I was less than amused by the fact that my driver was overjoyed to have a unicorn in the back seat. He started off toward the hotel but halfway there takes a detour. He clearly wants to show me something. I am too hot and dirty to argue at this point, so I just slump lower and wait for it to be over. He takes me to the train tracks as the afternoon train rumbles by, fiercely overcrowded and with children sitting outside on the roof. He points excitedly and yells “Slumdog Millionaire!” Aww. He was so happy to show me that. I even sort of smiled. How can you hate a country like that? And for redeeming his 150 million countrymen, he was rewarded with what was likely the largest tip in the history of Bengali auto-rickshaws.

The next day was Sunday, the start of the work week here. It was also the day I met Liton. Liton is my driver – unenviably tasked with shuttling me back and forth between the hotel, Bank office and bureau of statistics. Officially this mostly involves sitting in dead-stop traffic while leaning on the horn and yelling at the rickshaw divers. But unofficially it involves keeping me out of trouble. And therein lies the rub.

Liton has spent lots of time locking me in the car this week. On Sunday, he dropped me after work at the home of a friend of a friend with whom I would be having dinner. But he kept me locked in the car until the friend came out and personally escorted me. Repeat performance on Thursday at the same place. On Monday I ducked out of work a little early to go shopping so that I would have something to wear out to the villages and Wednesday and Thursday. Shahbag market had been recommended as being near the university and having slightly hipper clothes. But it is a sprawling four story enclosed behemoth of tiny boutiques, leftist bookstores and tea rooms conducive to plotting a revolution. Liton drove up, took one look inside at the fluorescent lighting and milling crowds (and long rows of clothing racks) and promptly put the car back into gear. “No Madame, no clothes here. We go.” I had to all but pull the emergency break to get him to let me out.

And so it went up until yesterday. On Friday I met up with a fellow unicorn also working here, and we set off to see the best sights that Dhaka has to offer. This included the Revolutionary War Museum – a poignant but very graphic look at the struggle for independence first from Britain and then from Pakistan, the university – with uncongested green spaces and fancy architecture – and finally to Old Dhaka – the historic narrow-alleyed part of the city along the Ganges River. Liton brought us to the Sadarghat ferry terminal, which sits at the end of the bazaar on one of the only streets navigable by car. We thanked him and told him that we would be back in a few hours – we were going to explore on foot and by rickshaw. And Liton had a coronary. No. Not happening. Too many Bangladeshis. Too many thieves. Not a place for foreign women. No. He just flatly refused, driving us instead to a commercial area several blocks north before finally unlocking the doors. Leaving us to walk back down to Sadarghat.

(Contrary to Liton’s hysteria, I feel very safe here. I get worried when I am someplace deserted – certainly not a problem here. The equivalent population of Delaware is within earshot at all times. I could fend off an unarmed attacker for long enough for them to raise a militia.)

But back to my walking tour. And, man, if I thought I stood out like a unicorn in New Dhaka, this was a whole different cricket game. Even hiding under our head scarves, people froze and gaped. If we stopped anywhere, chunks of traffic would break off and form concentric circles of gawkers. Occasionally they would take pictures with their cell phones or yell “what country?” But mostly it was a silent wall of eyes, just tracking us like the paintings in a Scooby Doo cartoon. Odd I have to say.

In any case, we hit the sights. Visited the Armenian Church (they were here as a trading class under the British, peaking in the 1850s and fading out as things got nationalized after independence – there is currently only one very old man left), Hindu Street (which was bumpin’ on a Friday when everything else was closed for prayers), Ahsan Manzil (the Pink Palace – which certainly was Pepto-Bismol pink) plus a wide assortment of mosques, markets and bazaars. And a bunch of really narrow streets.

We decided to cap off the day by hiring some guy to row us around the river, the heart and life-blood of old Dhaka, and watch the sunset. This didn’t go quite according to plan. First, as there are no tourists, there are no touts. And we don’t speak Bangla. So we had to loiter around the ferry terminal until someone basically guessed what we might want. Which touched off a fist fight as they figured out we were going to pay an obscene sum of money (little less than $5) to just be rowed around for an hour. Eventually we were put into a low riding wooden boat of decidedly questionable sea-worthiness and shoved off into the Ganges. As there isn’t much in the way of sites on the river – it is more just soaking up the general atmosphere of the place – our river tour consisted of us being rowed around to the rower’s friends’ boats so that they could take pictures of us with their cell phones. But I got some okay pictures of them so I can’t complain.


And in general I can’t complain. Before I came I psyched myself up by thinking that I was getting sent to hell in exchange for the Yankees impending World Series win – a deal that I would have readily made should the devil have shown up in Tanzania with the necessary paperwork. (I followed game 6 from a rural village via text message sent by the only other Western Hemispherian in the World Bank office – a Canadian Yankee fan. When they won, I inadvertently taught a gaggle of child gawkers the happy dance.) But it turned out to be a lot like India but without the hassles. Pleasantly surprised I must say.